myplate

First runner-up winner at a Smart City hackathon, MyPlate project used computer vision for license plate recognition and fee deduction directly from the credit card, removing the need for tickets and cards.

What’s Up

A while ago a few friends of mine told me about an upcoming 48 hour ”Smart City Hackathon”
that was going to take place in my area. After giving it a quick thought, we decided to participate.
The idea we had was an app that would ask you to take a picture of your license plate, link to your
credit card and whenever you pass by a toll booth or enter parking, the camera installed there would
read your license plate and automatically deduct the fee.

How we did it

Recognition Engine

This is the part that connects to the camera and is installed on-site wherever the system is being used.
It was built using Electron.

It watches the camera feed for motion, and if something in the frame exceeds the motion threshold,
it snaps a picture and sends it to the cloud for recognition.

The Cloud™

The part of MyPlate responsible for doing all the smart stuff it did was The Cloud™.
The Cloud™ is deployed on Google Cloud Platform and is essentially just a few
Cloud Functions that talk to the
Google Datastore
that we used as a DB and Cloud Vision API to do the actual
image recognition. Here’s the full list of things The Cloud™ did:

Read the plate (duh)

Create account

Create toll charge

Open parking charge

Close parking charge

List all user charges

Flag plate as criminal

The Mobile App

And the final bit was the user-facing part - the mobile application.
Designed by the allmighty Darbara Singh and built with
React Native, here’s what the app did:

Freakin’ cool logo (because that’s important at hackathons)

Create account

”Snap a picture” for the plate input

Forbid signup if no vehicle detected on picture

Onboarding

History of charges

Running timer for current open parking charge

Conclusion

After doing all of this and somehow successfully squeezing the demo in 4 minutes we managed
to walk away with the ”1st Runner Up” prize, which given the fact that it was my first hackathon,
like ever, was pretty damn awesome.

But anyway, if you’re interested to know about more of my projects, hit that back button at
the top and check out my other projects.